Active networking offers a change in the usual network paradigm: from
passive carrier of bits to a more general computation engine. The
implementation of such a change is likely to enable radical new
applications that cannot be foreseen today. Large-scale deployment,
however, involves significant challenges in interoperability,
security, and scalability. In this paper we define an active
networking architecture in which user control the invocation of
pre-defined, network-based functions through control information in
packet headers.
After defining our active networking architecture, we consider a
problem (namely, network congestion) that may benefit in the near-term
from active networking, and thus may help justify migration to this
new paradigm. Given an architecture allowing applications to exercise
some control over network processing, the bandwidth allocated to each
application's packets can be reduced in a manner that is tailored to
the application, rather than being applied generically. Our results
show that the ability to gracefully adapt to congestion makes a good
case for active networking.